Grand Theft Auto Advance Review Game Boy Advance

The Good

• Nice cartoony stylized graphics. Just love that fist when you hit people.
• Engaging revenge story has you working your way through criminal underworld rankings in an attempt to gain vengence for your buddies murder.

The Bad

• Serious lack of control when driving, making it nearly impossible to navigate a car around the city.
• Camera is too tight on the top down perspective, so you're constantly hitting other cars, buildings and cops.
• Frustrating and repetitive missions.

Features

• Open word game with multiple paths.
• Top Down 2D perspective.
• Primary missions that drive the story, plus side mini-missions that increase your cash.
• Loads of different cars and weapons.

The Game

Instead of porting the original Grand Theft Auto to the GBA, Rockstar decided to do a remake of the title that started their most successful franchise with an all new story and look. Taking place in Liberty City (from GTA 3) you play Mike, a small time crook who is about to skip town with your pizano Vinnie and a bunch of stolen cash. Before you can make your exodus, Vinnie is offed in a car bombing, so you naturally seek revenge, but to do so you’ve got to work your way through the crime syndicate to reach the dirty rats responsible.

When recreating the original GTA the developers took great care in trying to bring the story and feel of GTA 3 (the first truly popular title in the series) with the look of the original PS One classic. They covered just about all aspects, it takes place in Liberty City, features some of the same gangsters, has similar weapons and includes story scenes featuring GTA 3’s graphic art styling. The one thing they overlooked when crafting the remake is the key essence of a good driving game - actually making it fun to play.

Although GTA features an open city, you can’t traverse it all by foot, plus all of the missions require a car. The problem is that it’s literally impossible to drive in this city. The camera is zoomed in too tight on your car that you can’t see what’s right in front of you, causing you to constantly smash into other cars, buildings, pedestrians and of course cops. If you hit an officer, your “wanted” star rating increases, and since this happens constantly, you’ll end up in a high speed purist in no time. The pursuit ends quickly however when you immediately smash into something that will slow you down or destroy your ride, causing the coppers to catch you. The other cause to your motorist woes is navigating your car through the city is awkward and the controls react slowly. Even if you know an obstacle is coming up and turn in what should be plenty of time, you still smash right into it.

Stealing cars is a big part of Grand Theft Auto and it’s done well enough here. You have a lot of fun grabbing drivers out of their seats and hoping in. Aside from executing hits on enemy gangs and families, your main missions are typically stealing specific cars. Here is where we have our next problem, once you reach the area where your suppose to find the specific car, you have to return it to the next stage without any damage. With the driving problems of the game, even if you go at your absolute slowest speed, there is little chance of getting these missions accomplished.

It’s unclear why Rockstar made these decisions when the original GTA had a pretty good driving feel, and primitive yet decent enough graphics. Maybe they figured having the camera perspective the same as the original would have made the character graphics appear too small for the GBA screen, but what most of today’s modern, 3D, HD graphics developers and publishers often forget is that even if a game has super, high end graphics, it is all worthless when the game is frustrating to play.

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